deep sea diving in a kiddie pool

I know that I have been delinquent with my blogging. I do feel bad. I’m just not a great multi-tasker despite what my female gender membership contract promised. I have discovered that when I blog I get precious little else done, which is not good when you’re trying to finish a novel and homeschool a child. And I am. Trying to do both of those things. Because I’m crazy.

So what inspired me to post? Two words: Self promotion.

Anyone who knows me knows that self promotion is something at which I suck. I hate it. But I understand that it is necessary because if no one knows that you’ve created something for public consumption, then no one consumes it and you just have something to stick in a box in your attic for your grandkids to discover when they are sorting through your effects.

I think about things like this–mostly when I’m out of beer and the house needs to be cleaned.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve finally finished my book. That’s right, as much as I’d like to sit on it and tweak that f*cker forever, I realize that at some point I just have to declare it done and release it into the world to be shat upon by internet trolls. It reminds me a little of parenting, except that my book has never asked to borrow my iPad, clogged the toilet or been horrified when I change clothes. So really it’s my favorite child. Please don’t crap on my favorite child.

Fair warning: this is not a book of humorous parenting essays. Why would I want to publish something for which I have already built an audience? Come on, we all know that I’m not ruled by logic. Instead I’ve written a crime story/police procedural and now I will release it in a time of increasing anti-police sentiment.

It’s called Unusual Occurrence, just as the title to this post suggests. Would you like a boring definition of the term? Well here it is!

An Unusual Occurrence is a term used by police departments in reference to an event involving potential or actual personal injury and/or property damage arising from a natural or man-caused incident necessitating the declaration of a tactical alert or mobilization.

Like a plane crash.

I bet you thought that this would be a post about something weird that happened to me, like being attacked by a squirrel inside my car while drinking coffee and driving on the freeway. That would’ve been funny…I’m sincerely sorry. You deserve a good squirrel story.

Anyway, so many of you helped with the book in some way that the acknowledgments page might be nearly as long as the rest of the book and almost as riveting. There’s another reason to check out the book–you might see your name or that of a loved one in print!

It is still a few weeks out from being available but I wanted to give you ample notice because…well I don’t really have a good reason other than I’m really really excited. Really. Excited. Like a Born Again Christian at a Billy Graham revival. Seriously, you have no idea. I’m filled with the spirit, people!

I will leave you on that manic note. You may now return to your previously scheduled business. Thank you.

Look, I know I’ve been away a long time, so I’m not just going to stroll in here all blase and pretend that nothing has happened and everything is fine between us. I don’t want to insult your intelligence. But summer was rough. The kids were on me like fleas every second for a snack or to validate their latest Lego creation. As soon as they heard the keyboard tapping they’d descend. The pressure was incredible.

It had been my plan to send the kids to camp so that I might have a minute or two of productivity, but Hubs and I had a minor bank account fiasco wherein all of our money mysteriously disappeared. We were both baffled as to how this would happen. Coincidentally this occurred right around the same time that Hubs’s jeep was miraculously cured of many of its major ailments. Weird.

At any rate, I had to sacrifice any dreams of childless alone time. These things happen, so I decided to abandon all productivity and commit myself to fully enjoying the summer with my children. After all, time is fleeting and they won’t be this small forever. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth, hide the knives and treasure those little buggers.

Here we are treasuring each other on the highway. Note: Hubs stopped talking to all of us immediately after this picture was taken.

I learned some things in the process–about myself, about life. I’m a better person for it, albeit a better person who desperately needs a hair appointment. For instance:

It is physically impossible for me to treasure my children day after day, 24 hours a day without a steady flow of caffeine. Before the summer I had weaned myself off the stuff for health reasons but mid summer I had to weigh the importance of a steady heartbeat against the safety of my prodigies. Heartbeats are overrated.

Five year old boys are physically incapable of being quiet. There is a reason that there was never a book called The Diary of Arnie Frank. It would have lasted two pages and then Arnie would have forgotten about the Nazis and gone running down the hall singing at the top of his lungs while beating on a bucket. End of story. Girls know how to tiptoe and use their indoor voices. You could wrap a boy in foam and he would still find a way to shake the walls. It’s what they do.

Note: I sincerely apologize for using the Jewish holocaust with such flippancy. You’d think I was a twenty-something pop sensation.

“At least I don’t Twerk.”

The more you do with your children, the more they want to do. I can’t emphasize this enough: the key to your child’s happiness is lowered expectations. Providing them with gifts and stimulating activities only gives them unrealistic expectations for the future. Have you ever seen videos of children in third world countries receiving shoes for the first time? They are incredibly happy. My daughter has multiple shoes that she won’t even wear because they aren’t meeting her aesthetic expectations. And for every visit to the trampoline park this summer, I had to listen to ninety additional minutes of “what are we doing that’s exciting today?” and “I want to do something fun,” spoken in a whine and repeated ad nauseam. You know what’s fun? Not working in a sweatshop fifteen hours a day. You’re welcome.

The housing market is so filled with foreign investors equipped with psychic premonition and large quantities of cash that a cop and a stay at home mom can’t afford to purchase any single family home this side of Detroit. It’s remarkable really and further proof that House Hunters is a complete sham. I mean come on, a graduate student and an entry-level marketing coordinator are able to buy a beautiful craftsman style home that isn’t tagged with gang graffiti? That’s a fairytale. You want the real story? Follow us as we look at condemned homes filled with garbage and frightened animals, priced just beyond our range.

Inability to purchase aside, there is nothing my kids love better (with the exception of an overcrowded theme park) than freely snooping through other people’s homes. Open houses became one of our favorite free activities this summer. If summer had gone on any longer we would probably resort to breaking and entering.

The only family vacation we can enjoy without having to sedate Hubs is camping. He is completely relaxed when separated from society and surrounded by dirt, trees and creatures that might carry the Bubonic plague. They are making the ground harder than they used to, which was tough on my delicate frame and after two days of roughing it, my all natural, aluminum free deodorant cashed it in and left me to scare off the bears with my b.o., but other than that, camping was awesome.

Anyway, it’s good to be back. I’ll try not to stay away as long next time.

This picture was taken right after Conor tried to slip under the bar and plummet to his death. You can tell that I’m still mid heart attack.

Warning: The following is a snapshot into my psyche. Much like the movie, The Blair Witch Project, it’s mildly frightening with an unsteady focus that may cause motion sickness and/or trigger epileptic seizures.

I’ve done it. I’ve reached another milestone in my nihilistic life schedule: my 44th birthday. Against all of my personal expectations I exited my 43rd year of existence still breathing. Amazing but true.

If you’re scratching your head right now and wondering why this is such an astounding feat, you can step back in time and read this bad boy to catch up to speed. I’ll wait here.

Take your time. No rush. I’ve got to pick up my son from preschool but he can wait.

Even before my mother died I was obsessed with dying young, a notion fed perhaps by my fervent belief that I was Martin Luther King Jr. reincarnated as a small white female and my misguided romantic notions of martyrdom. I staged my own death at the tender age of five to gauge my family’s reaction. For the record: their reactions were extremely disappointing and I immediately wrote them out of my will, a slight that moved them even less than my faux-death, despite my impressive collection of tattered stuffed animals. Those people were cold.

Actually I was pretty zen about the whole idea of an early death for most of my life, having adopted a Richard Bach death-is-merely-a-new-adventure attitude. I was fairly certain that after death I’d achieve total enlightenment, a huge welcome party at the pearly gates and a perfect complexion, all of which seemed pretty freaking cool. Then I had kids and my zen went out the window along with my sleep schedule, replaced by the irrational fear that I would leave my children to struggle without a mother in Captain Agro’s Mini Boot Camp for Semi-Orphans.

You would think that after my malignant shoulder tumor turned out to be a sore muscle brought on by advancing middle age and I didn’t suffer a fatal heart attack while training for my 5K, I would’ve been freed from my psychotic burden. Not so. By the end of the year I’d battled Parkinson’s, MS and various forms of cancer all within my own imagination while lying in bed planning my memorial service, which by the way will be way better than the memorial service I planned for myself when I was five.

Anyway, I was expecting to feel relieved and elated about breaking the 43rd barrier, like a giant weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I figured I might even throw myself a Dodged That Bullet party or have some sort of wild weekend in Vegas with The Hangover cast. However, when it came right down to it, the thought of outliving my mother didn’t make me want to party. In fact it just made me sad. Just when I think I understand my own psyche. What a buzz kill.

Zach is taking this particularly hard. He didn’t know my mother but he was really looking forward to the wild weekend.

And to top it off I was over-scheduled, which made it hard to properly obsess and wallow in my angst. I kept thinking, “Is this how I want to spend potentially the last few months of my life? I should be reaching enlightenment sitting in an ashram in the heart of India or some other deeply meaningful nonsense that will vex my husband.”

Then (BAM!) my birthday came and went and life went on almost as if I wasn’t the center of the universe, which is weird because I’m pretty sure that I am.

Kidding. I was just trying on narcissism as a possible replacement for hypochondria.

So I’ve been wandering around a little aimlessly in these first couple of weeks of my 44th year. I mean, my death is no longer imminent and my memorial service is already planned, what to do with myself? Perhaps I’ll look at these as bonus years and just do whatever the fark I want (within reason–I do still have children to care for). The ashram is probably out…or maybe not. Do ashrams have reliable child care? I could be ashraming next week. Who knows? I’m a wild card.

This year I talked my daughter, Riley, into having a birthday party in an effort to help her manage her social anxiety. I wanted to show her that being the center of attention doesn’t have to be traumatic in a safe, low pressure environment…and also to make up for the fact that the only other party I threw for her sucked.

Okay, I need you all to look past my fragile ego and narcissism and focus on my desire to be a good mother here. Thank you.

Anyway, this party was much better than the last one. Our theme was Awkward Social Situations in a Chinese Setting, and I think we pulled it off. I’ll admit that the whole theme didn’t fully gel until the middle of the party when one of my daughter’s eight year old friends asked me for my full name and if I had a Facebook account. But then it all fell into place.

Awkward social situations go well with paper lanterns and balls of tissue.

This particular friend is a sweet girl, petite like my daughter with an innocent face…exactly the kind of person who turns out to be a sociopathic stalker in a Lifetime movie. And because that’s the way my brain works, an image of this girl boiling our rabbit on the stove a la Fatal Attraction immediately popped into my head, even though we don’t have a rabbit and the girl is really too young to be cooking without an adult’s supervision.

“I won’t be ignored, Mrs. Redican.”

Since it would be inhospitable to answer “None of your damn business!” to a guest in my home and also highly unlikely that I would be granted a restraining order against a third grader with dimples, I opted for the only reasonable alternative, feigning hearing loss, a language barrier and incontinence.

At that point the other girls were trying to draw and quarter each other in the living room so I figured that she would forget her need for my personal information. Eight year old stalkers have notoriously short attention spans as they are easily distracted by Littlest Pet Shop toys and Justin Bieber. As soon as she was safely in her parent’s car I put it out of my mind.

However, four days later at a school function the same girl approached me and complained that I hadn’t answered her friend request. Having not checked my Facebook page in a couple of days, the complaint caught me off guard. I hadn’t had a chance to carefully craft a casual but responsible response to such a request using my best understanding parent voice.

“Get away from me, evil child!”

Instead I said, “You sent me a Facebook request? I haven’t gotten it,” as if I had a friends list full of minors. Then I ran home and checked my account.

Sure enough, there was a friend request from an eight year old waiting for me which triggered a horrifying string of imagined situations: me hosting keg parties for grade schoolers, getting a stripper for my son’s sixth birthday party, taking prepubescent girls on secret runs for birth control. It’s a slippery slope. One day you accept a friend request from an eight year old and the next day you’re on trial for having inappropriate relations with your Middle School student.

I told myself that I was overreacting. I don’t even have a teaching credential.

To which I responded: Of course I’m overreacting. THAT’S WHAT I DO! You cannot expect me to receive a friend request like this and not descend into a downward spiral of parental panic anymore than you can expect me to sprout wings and fly. It’s in my nature.

Point taken.

But to be fair to my psyche, because it’s the only one I’ve got, an eight year old girl friending adults on social media who her parents don’t really know is dangerous. It might be antiquated thinking but I’m not a big fan of kids this age on social media to begin with. I’d like to go back to the days when kids played on the street without having to worry that some pedophile they met in a chat room was going to abduct them or that the suggestive pictures they took on their smart phone and then forwarded to the boy they had a crush on were being circulated across the internet. Thank God there were no smart phones in the 80s or there would be suggestive pictures of me all over cyber space.

Am I right, Lisa?

And even more importantly, where would I spill intimate details about my children and their tiny stalker-like friends or look at inappropriate memes and risqué comments if my Facebook news feed was invaded by young impressionable eyes? Seriously, you can’t expect me to be responsible all of the time and you really can’t expect that of my friends, some of whom are at least as crazy as I am.

So it looks like I’m going to have to have an awkward conversation with somebody’s mother while trying to avoid suggesting that their child is a stalker and/or that they are a bad parent. Am I the only one that doesn’t see this going well?

Well it was inevitable, I suppose. There are certain things that naturally occur. If you have a keg party somebody is going to pass out on your bed and if there is a mass tragedy somebody is going to come up with a conspiracy theory. And then you will read about it on your Facebook page in between pictures of somebody’s dinner and a cute meme.

So it seems that there is a small but vocal community that believes that the bombing was staged. Apparently, the wounded people on the ground were not acting as freshly bombed as one would expect and there was insufficient arterial blood spray. In a tragedy you want as much arterial blood spray as possible, you see. Duh. I saw enough Friday the 13th movies to know that. Without it you’re just making another Leprechaun.

This picture and caption would have also worked as a promo for the Mr. and Mrs. Smith movie.

Anyway, the conspiracy theorists were kind enough to put up a sequence of post bombing pictures and walk me through “the staging” so that I could see for myself how it actually went. It was impressively narrated by someone with professed EMT credentials. I took them at their word about their credentials because people on the internet never lie. At least that is what I was told by the West African man who requested emergency funds and nude pictures from me. The conspiracy theorists didn’t state how many bombings and staged bombings they’d been to but I’m sure it is extensive.

Anyway I was totally with them through their conspiracy lesson right up until they added the Newtown shootings and 9/11 as additional staged tragedies. That gave me pause because, wow, what a talented group of tragedy stagers that would take! I mean, as anyone who has ever seen an Ed Wood movie can tell you, it’s really hard to make fake planes look real. Or maybe the planes were real and the buildings were fake? Or maybe the whole scene was claymation? Okay, I’ll admit I’m fuzzy on the details of that particular conspiracy, because I tend to tune out and start thinking of possible paint colors for my living room when people talk about it.

“I want to be a terrorist!”

But here is what I do know based on my history as an occasionally employed actress and frequent movie goer:

You never go smaller with the sequel.

You don’t pull off a mega blockbuster and then follow it up with a quietly heartbreaking independent film. George Lucas didn’t make Star Wars and follow it up with The Empire Suffers Quietly In A Coffee Shop. It’s not the Hollywood way. If you have successfully staged the attack and annihilation of a section of New York by foreign terrorists then you have to go even bigger for your next staging. Like the annihilation of the entire Midwest by aliens. Am I right? Tom Cruise, back me up on this.

“It’s no staging. The mother ship is coming.”

So I was totally ready to write this whole conspiracy thing off, but then I got to thinking. I’ve had a lot of birthdays–what if those were all staged by the government? What if I’m not 43? Which would make a lot of sense given my maturity level, fashion sense and fondness for Dubstep.

And once I’d made that leap the next logical question was…

What if nothing bad has ever happened: the holocaust, Hiroshima, that weird dude I slept with in my 20s because I felt sorry for him. What if none of that had happened? What if I’m really 21 and sitting in a pod somewhere with a plug in my head? What if I’m Neo or that really hot chick in the black latex suit who can do flips in slow-mo? What if I’m the chosen one sent to free all of you from your pods?

“Whoa.”

You said it, Keanu.

That is a massive responsibility and some mornings I can’t even find my car keys. But I’m not going to shirk my duty. I will not leave you plugged in like last year’s iPad. You’re getting upgraded! Or downgraded. Actually I’m confused by my metaphor, but the point is that all of the hours I spent watching X-Files episodes and last week’s Mud Run has prepared me for this moment. I will not let you down!

PS. Does anyone have any Baby Powder I can borrow? I’m having a hard time getting into my latex suit. You know what, I’m just going to wear some black yoga pants instead. Don’t take the blue pill!

Sometimes the world is a giant sh!t storm, isn’t it? I don’t usually write about tragedies such as the Boston Marathon bombing. There are people far more eloquent in their sincerity so I usually leave it to them.

Then I saw Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue regarding the bombing and I thought that he got it exactly right. Check out his brilliance.

I lived 28 miles outside of Boston for three years. I married a man who grew up there. I have friends and a gigantic Irish and Italian family there. And let me tell you something:

Those are the toughest people I’ve ever met.

They are called Massholes by neighboring New England states for a reason. You don’t mess with a Masshole. You don’t mess with a Masshole’s friends and you damn sure don’t mess with a Masshole’s family (and given the popularity of the Catholic church and the procreative prowess of the populace there you can just assume that everyone is family.)

If you’ve ever driven the roads there and been cut off by a guy driving a pickup with a cracked windshield and rusted undercarriage, laying on his horn as he drove in a lane of his own creation after you assumed that you had the right of way simply because that’s what it told you in the driver’s booklet that you got from the registry, you have an inkling of just how tough they are.

Massholes view driving laws as mere suggestions devised for people who don’t have the balls to make their own rules. They subscribe to a Darwinian driving theory. The right of way goes to whoever has the stones to take it. That person will usually celebrate his/her victory with a festive, “Fahck you!” and a friendly one finger wave.

There is a reason that most of Hubs’s fondest memories involve stunts resulting in some kind of injury and/or fights. Maybe it’s years of chipping ice off of their cars in April, eating cream-filled, starchy foods, getting their @sses chewed for doing something they shouldn’t by the neighbor down the street who then sent them home to get their @sses kicked by their parents, getting all their molars pulled. Maybe those things gave them stones the size of glaciers. That’s just a guess. I don’t know where that toughness originates exactly. I just know that it’s there.

If you doubt me, just walk into a bar in Southie and say, “your mother’s a whore” to no one in particular. Of course you’ll want to make sure that your will is in order first.

“My mothah is a saint and a virgin.”

These people take the “R”s out of words with an “R” in their spelling and randomly put those “R”s at the end of other words like “Brenda” because they can. These people are not PC. They are not careful. They are not shy with their opinions. They are fiercely loyal. They are always ready to tell you a joke or kick your @ss…depending on the situation and whether or not you are wearing a Yankees hat.

They eat broken glass and road salt for breakfast (topped with a generous helping of Marshmallow Fluff.) You don’t pick on people like that. You can’t break their spirit. The weather has been trying for generations and it can’t be done.

But then again, the type of coward who would leave explosives in an area crowded with families and children and then run to safety before the carnage was unleashed wouldn’t understand that kind of spirit. They wouldn’t understand the Masshole propensity to love and fight and endure. To run toward danger to help those in need. So on behalf of my Masshole friends and family let me just say to those bomb-dropping cowards

FAHCK YOU!

*My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families and my most sincere gratitude goes out to the people who ran to help.

My in-laws were just in town for two glorious weeks. During their visit Hubs and I got not one, not two, but THREE date nights! Have I mentioned how much I love my in-laws? Yes? Okay then.

As Hubs and I usually space our date nights to once every Pope, I valued every single minute of bonus alone time I got with him, but one date was extra special. Hubs took me on an insider tour of his old patrol division in South Central. (We’re not supposed to call it South Central anymore because apparently the name has a negative connotation and by changing the name we have magically made all of its problems go away, but I’m a rebel).

Yep, changing the name makes it all better.

Right now I bet you’re thinking, “those two love birds sure know how to carve out moments of romance.” And you’d be right. We surely do.

I’ve been bugging Hubs to take me to that particular division for a while so that I could accurately describe it in my unpublished work of burgeoning genius, but every time I suggested it Hubs would get a look on his face as if he’d suddenly developed hemorrhoids and one of them had exploded. Apparently, according to crime stats, his own personal experience and the movie End of Watch, that area is dangerous and he loves me. Also he doesn’t know where all of our important paperwork is or how much Tylenol the kids get. But due to the UWBG (unpublished work of burgeoning genius) I would not let it rest.

So when he turned to me and actually suggested it on his own without any coercion or overt emotional blackmail I jumped up and down and ran to pick out my best South Central touring outfit before he changed his mind.

It’s Christmas for unpublished authors in the ghetto.

Then I ran back out:

Me: If someone starts shooting at us, is it better for me to recline in my seat or lean forward?Hubs: I’d recommend getting down on the floor so you have the protection of the–Me: Engine block! Right!

(Yes this was our actual conversation and no, it isn’t unusual for us to discuss things like this.)

At that point I may or may not have wet my pants a little in excitement and had an elaborate fantasy wherein Hubs and I were in a gun fight and I took a bullet in the shoulder and had to dive over the hood of my car to take cover behind said engine block. Then as I was losing consciousness, cradled in Hubs’s arms I said, “promise me that your next wife will be ugly and good with the children,” and Hubs laughed through his tears, realizing that I was the most bad@ss wife in the entire world.

I love that fantasy.

Then Hubs generously armed himself, I packed tasty South Central touring snacks and we departed in a ball of excitement (admittedly all mine). I was so filled with joy and gratitude that I actually let Hubs drive my new leased pride and joy and only commented on his Captain Agro driving style once on the freeway. Once we got into the neighborhood I forgot to care about the welfare of my car because it was SO EXTREMELY AWESOME!

This church is on Trinity street and the Holy Spirit burned its roof right off.

It was even better than my Ride Along in Rampart Division, when I got to see a felony arrest, a perimeter and ride Code 3 (lights and sirens) to a call, and it’s hard to beat that. Hubs is the best South Central tour guide and heavily armed husband EVER!

Seriously, he’s the Starsky to my Hutch, the Crockett to my Tubbs, the Gyllenhaal to my Peña…huh, it looks like I took you on an unintentional homoerotic tour of famous cop shows. Alrighty then.

“This was the best date night ever.”

Hubs expertly navigated the ‘hood, showing me the locations I’d used in my UWBG and some that applied to the work stories he’s shared, like “this is where I was chasing that gangster and we got hit by the Volvo” and “this is where I was wrestling with that guy on PCP and my partner stood back and watched.” He pointed out houses of “frequent fliers,” kept me informed of which gang’s territory we were in, answered all of my questions and pointed out some interesting characters and idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood while people stared at us as if they’d never seen a giddy, suburban soccer mom touring their neighborhood before.

Then Hubs took me to a really cute little Mexican place for lunch where I bought some souvenirs.

What? You thought I brought home a bag of crack and an undocumented worker? You need to look at your code of ethics, my friend. And anyway, you can totally buy those on the internet.

As it turns out I’ve actually been in that division a few times on my own, which I thought was very cool. It reminded me of my pre-Hubs days when I regularly wandered neighborhoods in which I could get mugged or at least need a tetanus shot. Hubs was not as excited about that realization as I was.

I understand his concern. He just doesn’t realize the extent of my bad@ssery. But one day when we’re in that gun fight…